


ultima ratio

by frostmantle



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, Garlean Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Gen, This will update slowly, and i wish they got more love for that, because the xivth legion are great antagonists, in which i quote angry WWI poets a whole bunch, in which the WoL has some backstory revealed, very short fics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-26
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-02-04 16:09:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18607951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frostmantle/pseuds/frostmantle
Summary: Very brief glimpses of the culmination of Baelsar's Folly. (Spoilers from Cape Westwind through to the end of the main ARR storyline.)





	1. the judge

===================================

_**...i mean the truth untold,** _   
_**the pity of war, the pity war distilled.** _   
_**now men will go content with what we spoiled.** _   
_**or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.** _   
_**–wilfred owen (1893-1918)** _

===================================

 

**I. the judge**

 

He had known his fate the moment the eikon-slayer darkened the threshold of the castrum but he meets her regardless. Orders are orders.

She stands before the XIVth Legion’s praefectus castrorum dressed like an Eorzean: golden hair grown now well past regulation length, svelte frame clad in simple hooded robes of white trimmed in red, an intricate cedarwood circlet bracing her third eye like a jewel setting. 

The weight of that gaze settles upon his massive armored frame without malice or aggression, and he understands she is taking his measure as well.

Rhitahtyn sas Arvina has ever been the most prosaic of the Black Wolf’s adjutants. There is a brutal honesty inherent in cold steel and strategy that of the three of them, only he truly understands as well as does the legatus himself. All very well to piece together an ancient machina or to ferret out and destroy a nest of rebels, but when it comes to battlefield deployment, supply lines, the brutal and final truth of war—that is Rhitahtyn’s work, and he excels at it.

He looks past the rumors, past the stories of her power— and sees only a deserter. A criminal.

Formidable strength notwithstanding, this woman broke ranks and fled in the midst of battle rather than die alongside her fellows. The fact that she is hardly the only one of the VIIth’s rank and file to have done such a thing is, frankly, immaterial.

Were it his decision, he would have overruled Livia’s sadistic games and Nero’s unbridled (and to his mind, wholly inappropriate) fascination. None of this following her about “under observation” while she felled eikons and made a general nuisance of herself; Rhitahtyn would have simply taken her head and had done with it.

Failing that, he would have dragged the recalcitrant medicus in chains to Castrum Centri for courts-martial, then back to Garlemald to publicly swing from the hangman’s noose.

His opinion, of course, was not requested---and perhaps it doesn’t matter in the end. Her presence here is all the answer that Gaius van Baelsar will require. It signals the city-states’ intent: they have chosen to stand against the Ultima Weapon rather than bend their knee to imperial will.

 _So be it, then,_ Rhitahtyn thinks, somewhat bleakly. For better or worse, the die is cast. Let the vagaries of fate and choice fall where they will. 

The men and women of his cohort cluster at his back, weapons not drawn yet, not yet, but he can see hands straying to gunblades should she take another step closer. 

He thinks of the good soldiers she cut down at Centri while freeing the Scions, the numbers she has killed in the days since, the blood on her hands, and tells the cohort to fall back to the perimeter wall. They are not a match for an enemy such as this.

But in the end, his men ignore his final orders: the ultimate irony, an act of collective insubordination born from their loyalty to a harsh, but fair man, a man who clawed and grasped and bled across countless fields in far-flung lands under the ivory standard, until he could stand as a symbol of what a conquered people could achieve. 

They watch as the pair continue to exchange words that are calm and then angry by turns, as the windows of possibility narrow, as any chance of accord comes to naught, as he bares steel against her.

And trusting to his judgment and to the might of empire, they fall at his side.


	2. the witch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That light is not a comfort.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 17 days until shadowbringers y'all, we all gon die :D

**_horror of wounds and anger at the foe,_  
** _**and loss of things desired; all these must pass.**_  
_**we are the happy legion, for we know**_  
_**time's but a golden wind that shakes the grass.**_  
_**\--Sigfried Sassoon (1886-1967)**_

**\----------------**  
**ii. the witch**  
**\----------------**

She cannot say anything to the adventurer in spite---she cannot curse, nor admonish, nor even warn. Her strength has left her body. 

Silent seconds stretch between them, time yawning into minutes as her life trickles in small rivers into the grooves and corners of corrugated steel castrum plating, as she feels the faltering of her own pulse. 

A bitterness rises like bile in the back of her throat. The Witch of Dalmasca has felled seasoned generals and war heroes and resistance leaders. This _deserter_ should have been nothing. Barely worth Livia's time, much less her trouble. 

And yet the Black Wolf has shown, to her mind, more recognition for this craven saviour of savages in the space of the past few moons than in years for Livia herself, she who has shed blood and guarded his plans against all outside threats, she who has shown more loyalty to the man who took her under his wing than any of the rest of them. 

(Even Garlond, that thrice-damned traitor, had abandoned their lord in the end: stealing an airship and crawling away into the dead of night to hide in a bolt-hole and lick his wounds, loudly condemning the very tools of war he'd helped to create. As if he weren't fully half the reason the Ultima Weapon had been primed to operational status in a matter of weeks.)

She had thought to prove herself worthy of her commander's regard by destroying this nuisance and her precious Scions. Grinding what passed for Eorzean resistance beneath her heel until defiance was but a distant memory, so thoroughly forgotten they would be the stuff of rumor and legend, not even a footnote in a history text--that would be an accomplishment he could not fail to recognize. 

But for all that planning, all that effort, all that _reassurance_ from the masked man who'd assured them their victory was at hand---she'd failed.

Choking on her own blood, Livia looks upon the woman who has killed her. 

What she sees there is no soft beacon to welcome home a pilgrim. This is the fragment of a star in the night sky: cold and bright, sharp edges like shattered glass. Glorious, remote, brilliant, and _merciless,_ and should any look upon it too close or too long, it would burn their eyes to ashes. That light is not a comfort. 

And Livia sas Junius, who has not feared another living soul in so many, many years, is afraid.

That light is fury and heat and fire and pain and-

"No," she gasps. "No-"

(heat of flames licking at her body sister's screams her mother lying lifeless and broken in the grass.)

_(it's happening all over again)_

She is not sure whether she has spoken this aloud or if it is a thought, flickering across her frantic mind like the searing kiss of flames over her limbs, and in her final agonies it is perhaps immaterial. 

_Please don't take him away-_

The deserter, the adventurer, the _eikon-slayer_ stands over her still, unmoving and unmoved. The Light is a woman once again, and her eyes are alive with a terrible, stern compassion. 

Livia is unsure which is worse: divine judgment or boundless pity. 

_Lord Gaius--!!!!_

She cries out to heaven, a plea to fall upon deaf ears, and the world slips away into shadows.

**Author's Note:**

> i am listening to benjamin britten's war requiem while writing these. if you haven't heard it, you need to fix that right now because it's probably the best thing britten ever composed and it's the source of *so many* of my themes when writing about war in this game.
> 
> find more of my word vomit at http://chrysalispen.tumblr.com


End file.
